The Outsiders (17 page)

Guiltily it made him oddly glad though,
in a bizarre way. Because it was that abhorrence and the utter
dread of what he had witnessed, that had kept the young graduate
student running…trying desperately to escape, despite his utter
exhaustion.

The light was fading fast now, as it
always appeared to on the Queen Charlotte Islands, even in the
summer months.

First it was light, then came a barely
perceived twilight that was quickly followed by a deep, stygian
blackness.

And within that dark in the forest,
McKinney now knew, there was contained a dreadfulness no one could
ever have imagined. As the night began to swiftly creep and seep
through the canopy of dense trees that surrounded them; his hopes
began to wane with equal alacrity.

Oh God…they were going to die here,
both of them. Screaming out in their death agony, just like the
others, he thought.

He shook himself mentally…no, damn it,
no! This wasn’t going to happen to them; or at least not to him. He
had a home to go to. Dear close friends in his church; a family who
truly loved him. His mother & father…two younger sisters… He
was determined that he was going to see them all again, whatever he
had to do to survive the terror that had been foisted upon them
all.

McKinney willed himself to believe that
he was going to live. He was going to live!

To purge any last negative thoughts of
personal defeat from his mind, he shook Bobbie as hard as his
remaining strength would allow. The young tall, wispy girl merely
sagged even more dispiritedly within his arms. Indeed, the filthy
and disheveled woman barely registered his violent
action.

McKinney spoke roughly to her, his
voice ragged with effort…a shouted horse-whisper from a throat
dried out from lack of water and an excess of adrenalin and
fear…

“
Come on, Bobbie….we just have to keep moving. The Dinan Bay
logging camp is close now, it has to be. It’s likely only a few
short miles to reach it. We’ll be safe there. We can make it.
Please don’t give up now…come on Bobbie, for Jesus Christ’s sake,
come on…we can make it”!

His tirade ended and the girl finally
now tilted her head up to look back and half acknowledge his
presence. Bobbie’s once bright green eyes that has so allured
McKinney since their freshman year at TXU, were now dull and
dispirited. Almost lifeless, in fact; perhaps a precursor of the
fate that she felt certain awaited her.

No real recognition was apparent within
their dim depths, only cattle like resignation of what was to be.
The girl slumped even further forward; she became a dead
weight.

McKinney’s effort weakened muscles
couldn’t support the woman’s burden any further. Without him
propping her up, the haggard girl slowly collapsed to the soft
ground like a tall yet slender felled young pine.

Once there, with finality, amongst the
dead leaves and forest floor detritus, she briefly became animated
once more curling herself up into a tight fetal ball; angular arms
and legs tucked in to wait for what must inevitably follow.
McKinney realized that Bobbie had now begun to inexplicably sing in
a low, childlike voice. Her mind had obviously retreated back into
her childhood…to a place where she felt the safest; where
reassurance had always been within easy reach….it was pitiable and
terrible and he could hardly bear to listen to her pathetic little
voice:

“
Jesus loves the little children…”

McKinney
looked down at her huddled form with a feeling of incredible
sadness. He knew that for his friend Bobbie, the long, hard
struggle for life was obviously over and resigned himself to the
fact that he’d done what he could to save her. But it certainly
wasn’t over for him yet, and if he could save himself, he
would.

With sphincter loosening suddenness, a
soulless inhuman snigger came from somewhere close back in the
darkening tree line. He could smell the rank stench that he now
associated with violent death.

McKinney’s head shot up, wildly glaring
into the gloom at the direction the awful sound had emanated from,
attempting to see the threat that he could only smell and
hear.

His legs suddenly found a life of their
own. Without his conscious volition he took a diffident, foot
dragging, backward step.

Then another. And another.

He had covered six hesitant steps in
this manner when he stopped, frozen to the spot. A dimness seemed
to detach itself from the deeper darks of the forest. A shadow that
snaked out towards Bobbie’s tucked in feet. An amorphous yet
unsubstantial mass that encompassed her exposed shins easily. Still
singing in the wretched feeble childlike voice, the woman was very
slowly, still in a fetal position, being dragged backward, off the
logger’s trail and into the trees.

All McKinney could do was be a dumb,
motionless witness to the terror that was unfolding before him. In
the last few seconds, before the young woman’s face disappeared
into the darkness, Bobbie seemed for the briefest second to come to
herself and the enormity of what was actually happening to her. Her
eyes, alive and animate once more locked with his. There was no
mistaking the expression; she was desperately pleading with her
friend to help her; to save her from the unspeakable thing that was
pulling her away from him…but even that final plea was soon lost to
him as she slid from view into the dark.

The last thing he saw of poor Bobbie
was her starkly white arm and hand; her fingers now outstretched,
clutching and clawing desperately but with an inevitable futility
for any anchor she could find within the soft loam of the
trail.

Something she could grab onto, some
last purchase she could cling to, to prevent her from being dragged
away to her own death.

At this last horrific sight, McKinney
was suddenly freed from the invisible force that had rooted him to
the spot. He turned on his heel and ran down the path for his
life.

The rough trail turned to the left, and
at first and headed in a generally downward direction. The ambient
daylight all around him was fast fading away now, as red dusk gave
over blacking night; McKinney could barely see more than a few feet
in front of him as he tore along.

But what his human eyes lacked, his
ears made up for. They were pursuing him in earnest now he realized
in terror. No longer content toying with their prey, they were
combining to bring him down quickly.

He could hear their massive scampering
forms crashing within the trees in the blackness; their unclean
stink gagged him, cloying his nostrils with the odor of corruption,
blood, feces and death.

The knowledge that they weren’t as yet
in front of him as far as he could tell spurred the young student
on to fresh effort.

That logging camp had to be close now.
Please God…It had to be! Please let it be!

The path suddenly took an unexpectedly
sharp turn to the right, then started up a gentle incline that
seemed frustratingly to get steeper and yet steeper with each
passing second, slowing McKinney down considerably. The trees on
either side of the trail seemed to crowd into him, filtering out
what little light there was. Darkness was nearly upon him,
metaphorically and literally. He just couldn’t physically go on
much further.

His heart was now pounding so hard in
his ears, he thought it might actually burst from his efforts. The
air that McKinney was now forcing in and out of his lungs had a
consistency that made it like a torturing liquid fire; molten,
heavy and scalding to the abused delicate tissues within his
ribcage. It was an agony to pull it in and out of his wheezing
chest. He noticed, dully, that he could now taste the coppery
flavor of blood at the back of his throat.

Then with a suddenness that was like a
switched on light in a darkened room he realized he had staggered
to the apex of the path.

He was groggily looking down with a
hazy, blurred vision into the dark of a small but steep
valley.

There were lights down there! Bright
shining fixed points of light, more beautiful to him than the
brightest or most majestic star in the black velvet heavens! It was
the lights of the Logging Camp! He’d found it, thank the Lord…He
could still actually make it!

With only the briefest of hesitations
he stumbled forward once more, willing his leaden legs and numbed
body into one final last ditch effort.

He was beyond pain now he was an
automaton; a flawed mechanical being of torn muscles and bloodied
flesh that could only limp along.

McKinney had become a creature with one
single abiding thought; just one purpose to his whole existence…to
reach the safety of the Dinan Bay camp.

Then he was on the ground.

He realized he could taste the rich
earth of the worn trail in his mouth because he was face down on
it.

He had collapsed because the wrenched
muscles and torn ligaments of his abused body would no longer obey
his insistent brains instructions to move. McKinney just lay there,
the spirit was no longer willing; and the flesh was very, very
weak.

He smelt them. He heard them. They were
literally all around him now. He closed his eyes in terror of what
he knew must now come; but part of him was relieved.

God would have him soon enough
now.

The growls were soft, almost human...
almost.

He felt an enormous elemental strength
lift him up high by just his left arm. The shoulder joint instantly
dislocated, but McKinney was too much in shock to even scream. He
dangled for a few seconds being shaken like a rag doll; then he was
on the ground once more.

His face was planted back firmly in the
earth of the trail…but now that soil was muddy, wet, nauseating
even. He could feel it warm and gluey against his cold skin. He
weakly opened his eyes to look. With horror he took in that the
reason he now lay in thick sludge. Even in this light he could see
that his own blood had provided the medium to make it that way. His
torn off left arm, ragged and ripped at the socket end, lay just a
few feet from him.

Before he could fully take that entire
gruesome discovery in, something was yanking at his wet denim
jeans, moving his torn away limb from his line of sight…tearing and
stripping away the last vestiges of the material from his numb
legs.

The strength used was such that his
thick leather belt snapped like rotten twine. He couldn’t even
resist as his underpants were torn away from him; the force of that
cruel action lifted his whole body off the ground for a second, and
then slammed it back onto the wet trail floor as the drawers were
ripped off.

Dizzy, sick and unresisting, McKinney
dimly accepted that the same something was tugging hard now at his
genitals, pulling; twisting at them eagerly with a vicious animal
force…their efforts were sliding him bodily along the rough
ground.

He lifted himself up weakly on his
remaining arm just in time to see a huge grotesque hand completely
tear away the scrotum and penis in a shower of bodily fluids from
his unyielding body.

Then he did scream, not from pain but
from shock; McKinney short death screech was a signal to the others
and they were upon him at once in frenzy; greedily tearing out
greasy loops of wet intestine and warm succulent organs that they
gained access to by simply tearing open his soft belly. They were
eating him alive. And he knew it.

And as McKinney was sent into his final
oblivion, he thought, with an odd sense of wonderment that he
heard, at the very last, an awfully strange thing….

“
Jesus loves the little children…”

Rhys Hughes

It was hot. I went into a bar. Inside it was cool.
The barman looked at me and said, “What’ll it be?” He was sweaty. I
needed a drink, so I licked my lips and asked for a gin sling. It
was hot outside. The barman frowned and said, “What did you
say?”

“
I’ll have a gin sling, that’s what I
said,” I said.

“
A gin sling?” the barman said.

“
A gin sling,” I said.

He made me a gin sling. It was cool. Outside it was
hot. I finished my drink. I needed another.

“
I’ll have another,” I said.

“
Another gin sling?” the barman
said.

“
Yes, a gin sling,” I said.

He made me a gin sling. It was cool. Outside it was
hot. I licked my lips. There was a fish on the wall. Not framed
behind glass, but nailed to the wall. It stank a little.

“
It stinks a little,” I said, “that
fish.”

The barman frowned at it. “Because of the heat,” he
said.

“
Because it’s dead,” I said.

“
As well,” he said.

“
I need another drink.” I said.

“
A gin sling?” he said.

I nodded. He made me a gin sling. I drank it. Outside
it was hot. Inside it was cool. “A fish is like a novel,” I said
and nodded at the fish. The fish didn’t nod back. It was
stiff.